Star Wars Research Causing Battles On Campus

As a physics professor at Lafayette College and a researcher at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, David Rehfield has very little spare time, particularly for protest and dissent.

But last week, as criticism of President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) intensified in Washington, Rehfield started circulating petitions at Lafayette College that seek to boycott all campus research related to the program, commonly called Star Wars.

"I have not been active on these kinds of issues for quite some time," said Rehfield, who started the petition drive last Tuesday. "If this issue would go away, I'd be happy to return to my nuclear physics research."

As Rehfield shuttles the petition through offices and laboratories at Lafayette, professors at Lehigh University, a nationally recognized engineering school, have started to circulate the same pledge. Eight schools in Pennsylvania and 50 campuses across the country are circulating petitions, according to organizers of the protest, and Rehfield said he plans to contact faculty members at Muhlenberg, Cedar Crest and Moravian colleges this week.

"I think it's dangerous when the American people are told that this system will render nuclear weapons obsolete," said Rehfield.

The petitions, which describe as "ill-conceived and dangerous" the Reagan administration's plan for a "shield" against nuclear attack, request that professors and graduate students "neither solicit nor accept" Star Wars funds.

Rehfield, a member of the American Nuclear Society and the American Physical Society, said he has circulated the petition in Lafayette's engineering, computer science, chemistry and physics departments.

Tomorrow, the 43-year-old professor said, he will bring the petition before a full faculty meeting. A press conference is planned for later this week.

Merely a dream of military planners and some politicians just three years ago, Star Wars is now larger in scope than NASA's Apollo project and the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb, according to Physics Today, a professional trade journal.

Congress has tentatively set aside $2.7 billion next year for Star Wars research, and President Reagan has proposed that $26 billion be set aside for research over the next five years. The system could cost more than $1 trillion, Reagan administration officials have said.

While many federal science grants have been frozen, and with the lure of huge research grants dangling before them, many university professors have begun to send "White Papers," or informal grant proposals, to Washington.

At Lehigh, at least 10 professors have mailed "White Papers," according to Dr. Yong W. Kim, chairman of Lehigh's physics department. Kim, who sent one of the proposals, said about half of the physics department's current research is defense-related.

"Our mission is to explore unknown natural phenomena, and there are many issues under SDI that are of great interest to physics research," he said. "Whether it's a sensible thing for the Department of Defense is a separate issue from the fundamentals of basic research." Kim said the Star Wars program, "offers very attractive opportunities for research."

One concern for many professors is that the research, now in an unclassified state, could quickly become classified should a breakthrough be made, preventing discussion and publication of their findings.

Reagan administration officials have conceded that the unclassified category could be changed. In that event, research would be removed from the campus and transferred to a private laboratory.

Kim said if research at Lehigh produced a significant discovery, the government would classify only that particular application of the research grant. "That would not be any kind of a problem," he said.

"This is one of the overwhelming concerns for the scientific community," said William C. Davidon, a professor of mathematics at Haverford College, where petitions are circulating. "This work will become retroactively classified."

Davidon said research by university math departments is crucial to a Star Wars defense, a system that must rely upon complicated computer programs and mathematical probabilities. And if findings are classified, the academic freedom upon which the mission of universities rests would be impaired, he said.

"It's very important that we show there are scientists and engineers who do not support the government on this project," said John Wood, a professor in Lehigh's material and metallurgical science department. Wood, along with Ferdinand Beers, a Lehigh professor emeritus who taught engineering and mechanics for 37 years, started the petition drive last week.

But because Lehigh relies heavily on grants from the Department of Defense and Department of Energy, Wood predicted that "there will be faculty members who feel very strongly in the other direction."